(3) Tue Aug 08 2006 22:24Dada Maps:
In 1996 I cut up a road atlas and pasted it into an AAA map of southern California. Because the scales were different, a major highway in one part of the country would feed into a street on the LA detail of the road map. This was my Dada Road Map.

I got this map laminated, but I always thought my craftsmanship on it was rather shoddy, so I never hung it up. Recently I foisted it on Jake Berendes, who pretended to appreciate it.

But once I got it out of my head, a similar idea took its place. Google Maps has pregenerated static image tiles for maps at different scales, and it wouldn't be hard to write a program that tiled them together like Google Maps does, except not helpfully.

So I present Dada Maps, which uses tiles from all over the world to create a new evocative map every 5 minutes. It's what I wanted my earlier project to look like, and it's not subject to scarcity. Enjoy!

Image tiles are displayed as normal images in the web browser, smushed together. You can right-click on the Google Maps screen and view them. At least I can. They might have some Javascript voodoo to prevent this that my browser doesn't run.